1. Technical Field
Example embodiments of the present invention relate in general to transmission and reception of uplink data and more specifically to a method of transmitting and receiving uplink data, which is suitable and efficient to transmit and receive a small amount of uplink data in an application such as machine type communication in a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced system.
2. Related Art
In a conventional 3GPP LTE-Advanced system, a radio bearer includes a signaling radio bearer (SRB) for signal processing communication of each control entity such as radio resource control (RRC) or enhanced mobility management (EMM) and a data radio bearer (DRB) for user data transmission. An SRB1 is generated by an RRC connection setup process, and then an SRB2 and a DRB are generated by an RRC reconfiguration process.
That is, in the conventional 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced system, a terminal in an idle state can transmit an uplink packet after performing the RRC connection setup process and the RRC reconfiguration process for DRB setup.
FIG. 1 is a sequence diagram for explaining an uplink packet transmitting process in a conventional 3GPP LTE/LTE-advanced system.
Referring to FIG. 1, when an application data management block of a terminal (user equipment (UE)) detects an uplink packet, the application data management block notifies an EMM block of the detection of the uplink packet (S101). The EMM block transmits a service request message to an RRC block (S102), so that an RRC connection setup process (S110) starts.
Thereafter, a DRB is generated through an RRC reconfiguration message (S120). When this process is completed, an application data management block can transmit uplink data to a network side.
However, when the terminal transmits a small amount of uplink data as in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication which is being studied in the IEEE or machine-type communication (MTC) which is being studied in 3GPP, particularly, in the case of an MTC terminal that performs only uplink data transmission once without receiving downlink data, it is very inefficient to perform all of the processes illustrated in FIG. 1. In addition, when many M2M terminals or MTC terminals request a connection at the same time, it is difficult to cope with an increase in a load, and thus the resolution of this problem is required.